Denniveniquity

Boyd’s understated yet deeply moving second graphic memoir (after Chicken Rising) recounts her experience as a shy girl entering junior high in late 1970s Canada. Dawn’s mom, a bridge- and bingo-playing paragon of small-town decency, thunders against sex in movies, declares that the Legion hall where her husband enjoys a drink is a “den of iniquity,” and leans against the door of the bathroom while Dawn bathes, admonishing her that “Jesus sees everything you do.” Dawn turns these proclamations into a song, “Denniveniquity,” that she sings to herself as she heads to the wood-paneled basement to wild out on a precious night alone: smoking like her parents, tippling from their musty bottles, and blasting Barry Manilow. Boyd’s achingly funny vignettes follow Dawn from 1977—the year of seeing Star Wars four times, which gets spoiled when a group of boys at the theater call her “Tits Almighty”—to 1980 and her first kiss, with one of a series of boys she pursues, flees from, gets bored with, and panics over. Boyd crafts scenes that are piercingly precise and scraped of sentiment, with expressive, detailed art that illuminates how Dawn’s face reveals her joys, disappointments, confusions, and occasional bursts of insight. It’s a poignant and prickly blast from the past. (May)